I should’ve kept the Night Mares with me, scouting. If I had, this never would have happened.
Moving fast doesn’t help if you move exactly the wrong direction. Dim people ride a mule to their conclusions; bright ones ride a racehorse. But not always in the right direction.
“No,” Kip said. “They’re our fastest troops. That’s why I sent them. Before any messengers could catch up with them, they’d have split in a hundred directions anyway, trying to rally the villages.”
“So have we already lost?” Ben-hadad asked. He was skipping ahead of the rest of them to the final judgment. That was just how fast his mind worked. Ben might well become a great general in time, but his true genius lay with the machinae he could imagine, and then actually make, and then perfect. Few people could do even one of those things.
Of them all, Ben-hadad was the one who should change history—and would, if Kip didn’t get him killed first.
Kip pulled back his sleeve where the Turtle-Bear tattoo was vibrant with all the colors he’d recently drafted. “ Turtle-bears can do many things, but one thing they’re shit at: they don’t know how to give up.”
“Are you telling me you have a plan?” Cruxer asked.
“Does this have something to do with why you went to the window yesterday?” Ben-hadad asked.
The crowd today, as Tisis had predicted, was easily twice as large.
The seals on the door cracked open, but there was the appropriate knock, so no one was alarmed. Tisis came in. Kip was glad to see her. “News?” he asked.
She nodded. “I have an update on our . . . cicatriferous friend.”
Private nicknames were useful when you were worried about being overheard, so they’d privately coined that for Daragh the Coward, who was famous for his many scars.
“Good news, I hope?” Kip asked.
“No,” she said. She looked ill. “But there’s something else first.”
She blew out a breath as she looked around at the Mighty. She tossed her petasos onto the table. “I’m in charge of the scouts. This map is mine. Kip invented it, but all the intel on it is work I cleared. It’s all from interviews I conducted, reports I checked. I’m responsible for what’s on it and for what’s not. I denote reports I don’t trust or have questions about. Anything that’s wrong on here is my fault. And I loused up, badly. I still have no idea how Koios took the river without me hearing about it. There are rumors now about river monsters, which I assume and really hope are river wights—I don’t know, and I still can’t confirm them. Regardless, it’s an enormous failure. I’ve got people checking everything, but it may be weeks before we know what went wrong. There should have been some refugee, some report. Maybe there was. Maybe I filtered it out. I must have. I’ve got ideas about what happened, but I’m not even going to offer guesses right now. Not after this.”
Tucking an errant strand of blonde hair behind an ear, she looked at everyone in turn around the table, except Kip. “I failed you, and I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
There was only silence. No one protested that she hadn’t bungled things badly.
She looked over at Winsen. “If you give me shit, Win—”
“I won’t,” he said.
“. . . I’ll deserve it,” she said, finishing over his words.
He looked at her one moment more. Then he shrugged. “I won’t.”
Dammit, Winsen, don’t you go surprising me with a glimmer of humanity.
Finally she looked at Kip, “My lord. I failed you most of all. I’d like to offer my—”
“Denied. Give us your report,” he said.
She didn’t want anything soft from him, not after such a failure, not in front of these men, whose acceptance she craved so much.
They accepted her as one of the Mighty, but she was different. It wasn’t or wasn’t only that she was a woman; Teia had obviously belonged with them, different as her own abilities were from theirs. But Tisis feared they only tolerated her for Kip’s sake. She feared they thought her weak because she was no warrior.
The worst thing Kip could do in this moment was coddle her. It would alienate her from them forever.
She took a deep breath. “With the Blood Robe deserters and the refugees and escaped slaves from the war, I’ve been tracking upward of fifty bandit groups, but I concentrated on Iphitos the Archer, Bardan the Grave Digger, Colm the Cannibal, with Daragh the Coward having a smaller band, but claiming territory we’ve traversed. I tried to get agents in with these various bandits, but each band requires anyone who joins to do one terrible thing or another as initiation to weed out such infiltrators. Do you know how many good guys are willing to murder innocent people in order to infiltrate a gang of bad guys?”
“None, I’m sure,” Cruxer said.
Kip could think of one: Teia.
He didn’t say it, of course. Not to his wife.
“Anyway, so I couldn’t get good sources, but now that Daragh the Coward’s army is within two days’ march, I’m working on getting figures of the composition of his forces now.”
They all chewed on that.
“He’s a bandit, not a soldier. You think we can buy him off?” Ben-hadad said.
“With what money?” Ferkudi asked.
“You were saying, earlier? About a plan?” Cruxer prompted Kip.
There were few options, and none of them good. No use bemoaning it. Kip said, “Pull the last remaining Night Mares we have from messenger duty. Send them to surround Daragh the Coward’s camp tonight and tomorrow. Tell them to let themselves be seen, though. Then move stealthily to another side of their camp and be seen again. They’re to do all they can to appear to be a much larger force.” Kip looked around the room, seeing sudden hope in some of their faces. He trusted these men with his life. He trusted them even with his fallibilities. “Truth is, calling it a plan would be generous. And it relies way too much on an open question.”
“What’s that?” Ferkudi asked.
“What’s an ‘open question’?” Winsen asked him. “ ‘Well, you see, son, when a mommy question and a daddy question love each other very much—’ ”
In unison, Big Leo, Ben-hadad, and Cruxer said, “Shut up, Win.”
“What’s the question?” Cruxer asked, trying to get them back on track, as ever.
Kip said, “How much am I really Gavin Guile’s son?”
Chapter 11
Aliviana had stood in place for two thousand seven hundred seconds, hands folded in front of her, chin high. In their hundreds, the petitioners had vacated the hall. Gods don’t inconvenience themselves for mortals.
But apparently, they do inconvenience one another. Her patience had worn thin after the first six hundred and twenty seconds. It was such a transparent power play to make her wait while he took his time that her estimation of the White King fell by the minute.
Then she realized he wasn’t merely waiting to see if he could goad her into some outburst; he was taking counsel. He sat silent on his throne with the air of one listening to attendants. Very interesting. She would have to speak with Beliol about that later.
“Your old love is in Dúnbheo,” the White King said finally.